Two of the game designers from Cyanide's studio in Montreal flew down to New Mexico on Friday to give me a look at their GAME OF THRONES RTS game (that's Real Time Strategy, for those of you who don't speak Gaming), which is now done and will be rolling out Real Soon Now.

Now, I have to admit, I am far from being an expert on videogames. In fact, I've never played any of the current RTS games. My experience with videogaming was almost entirely with older, turn-based DOS strategy games like ROMANCE OF THE THREE KINGDOMS, PIRATES, MASTER OF ORION, RAILROAD TYCOON, and the like. And as you can probably tell from those titles, I stopped videogaming some years ago (not because I did not like it -- truth to tell, I liked it too much, and found that I was spending way too much time playing games on my computer when I should have been writing).

That being said... I thought what I saw looked really cool. And Ty, who DOES play a lot of videogames, seemed impressed as well. The gang at Cyanide (Montreal) have come up with some innovative features for this one, that should help make A GAME OF THRONES: GENESIS unlike any other RTS on the market at present. And fun to play as well, we hope... but that's a verdict that will need to come from the gamers out there.

Focus, our publisher, has opened an official website for GENESIS. Check it out:

(Just to be clear. This is the RTS game, designed and developed by Cyanide's studio in Montreal. A second videogame, an RPG, is also under development at Cyanide's studio in France, but that one won't be along for a while yet. The two games are very different, so please don't get them confused).

Anyway, I enjoyed having the crew from Cyanide down here, and liked what they had to show me. I hope you will as well.

E-sports is competitive computer gaming. There are tournaments with cash purses for the winner.Balancing it just means making sure that there is no one way to victory that makes all the other possible choices pointless.

"Electronic sports, abbreviated e-sports is used as a general term to describe the play of video games competitively. They are played competitively at amateur, semi-professional and professional levels including in leagues and tournaments.

There are a number of titles that have a professional gaming scene. The top players can make a living playing the games on the marketing value they gain as a result. Hundreds, thousands and even millions of dollars in prize money are turned out each year for competitors in these titles."

Think of chess. You can have multiple societies playing it for a thousand years, everyone study it for their entire lives, tournaments with huge prizes.. and the game is still fun and interesting to play and watch.

Unfortunately, most strategy games "break" (devolve into doing the best strategy using the best of the available races) in days because they aren't crafted with enough depth to handle this kind of "competitive" gameplay.

It's definitely a hard world for a new RTS game to enter right now, because Starcraft 2 didn't "break" and has thusly killed almost every RTS game on the market and stolen its audience :-)